Apple's App Clips might facilitate the adoption of contactless payments

According to The Spoon, App Clips will enable users to perform daily activities such as paying for their morning coffee, discovering a restaurant nearby, and getting recipes for Drop-enabled connected appliances. Therefore, by using App Clips, the user will pull down features from the app through NFC, QR codes, or Apple Clips codes to engage in those three scenarios, without having to download three different apps. Subsequently, the ‘Clip’ enables the transaction to proceed without having to create a new account – because it uses Apple Sign In – or a credit card – because it uses Apple Pay. 

Although App Clips still need to be adopted by merchants in order to work, eateries might adopt this solution as customers want to minimise human-to-human contact, and use more contactless payments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, Apple pilots the App Clips as a way to discover new apps, even though it seems more like a way to avoid downloading them, since part of the difficulties encountered while using contactless payments is the need of downloading an app, creating an account, and entering a credit card number.